Named entity recognition (NER) is a task that seeks to recognize entities in raw texts and is a precondition for a series of downstream NLP tasks. Traditionally, prior NER models use the sequence labeling mechanism which requires label dependency captured by the conditional random fields (CRFs). However, these models are prone to cascade label misclassifications since a misclassified label results in incorrect label dependency, and so some following labels may also be misclassified. To address the above issue, we propose S-NER, a span-based NER model. To be specific, S-NER first splits raw texts into text spans and regards them as candidate entities; it then directly obtains the types of spans by conducting entity type classifications on span semantic representations, which eliminates the requirement for label dependency. Moreover, S-NER has a concise neural architecture in which it directly uses BERT as its encoder and a feed-forward network as its decoder. We evaluate S-NER on several benchmark datasets across three domains. Experimental results demonstrate that S-NER consistently outperforms the strongest baselines in terms of F1-score. Extensive analyses further confirm the efficacy of S-NER.

The topic of community detection in social networks has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Existing methods always depict the relationship of two nodes using the snapshot of the network, but these snapshots cannot reveal the real relationships, especially when the connection history among nodes is considered. The problem of detecting the stable community in mobile social networks has been studied in this paper. Community cores are considered as stable subsets of the network in previous work. Based on these observations, this paper divides all nodes into a few of communities due to the community cores. Meanwhile, communities can be tracked through incremental computing. Experimental results based on real-world social networks demonstrate that our proposed method performs better than the well-known static community detection algorithm in mobile social networks.

Conflict resolution for knowledge graphs (KGs) is a critical technique in knowledge fusion, ensuring the resolution of conflicts between existing KGs and external knowledge while maintaining post-fusion accuracy. However, current approaches often encounter difficulties with external triples involving unseen entities due to limited knowledge. Moreover, current methodologies typically overlook conflict detection prior to resolution, a crucial step for accurate truth inference. This paper introduces CRDL, an innovative approach that leverages conflict detection and large language models (LLMs) to identify truths. By employing conflict detection, we implement precise filtering strategies tailored to various types of relations and attributes. By designing prompts and injecting relevant information into an LLM, we identify triples with unseen entities. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of CRDL over baseline methods. Specifically, our method surpasses the state-of-the-art by achieving a 56.4% improvement in recall and a 68.2% increase in F1-score. These results clearly illustrate the enhanced performance and effectiveness of our approach. Additionally, ablation studies and further analyses underscore the importance of the components within CRDL.

Prerequisite chains are crucial to acquiring new knowledge efficiently. Many studies have been devoted to automatically identifying the prerequisite relationships between concepts from educational data. Though effective to some extent, these methods have neglected two key factors: most works have failed to utilize domain-related knowledge to enhance pre-trained language models, thus making the textual representation of concepts less effective; they also ignore the fusion of semantic information and structural information formed by existing prerequisites. We propose a two-stage concept prerequisite learning model (TCPL), to integrate the above factors. In the first stage, we designed two continual pre-training tasks for domain-adaptive and task-specific enhancement, to obtain better textual representation. In the second stage, to leverage the complementary effects of the semantic and structural information, we optimized the encoder of the resource–concept graph and the pre-trained language model simultaneously, with hinge loss as an auxiliary training objective. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Our proposed model improved by 7.9%, 6.7%, 5.6%, and 8.4% on ACC, F1, AP, and AUC on average, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.